I. Address and Greeting: From the well-known Elder to a well-known Lady.

The greeting, with its invocation, fills a large space. It is framed after the manner of St. Paul, and remarkably incorporates the two points of truth and love which occupy the whole Epistle.

2 John 1:1-2. The elder the aged Apostle John, who gives himself this title because it was the only one that combined authority with age to the elect Kyria and her children: nothing is known about the two sisters introduced at the beginning and the end, save that they were influential persons, probably widows with large families. St. Paul speaks of Rufus as ‘elect in the Lord,' and St. Peter of ‘elect strangers:' no higher term could be suggested by Christian courtesy.

Whom I love in truth: the ‘whom' in the masculine embraces all of the household addressed. They were elect or loved of God, and therefore elect and beloved of the apostle; according to his own axiom in 1 John 5:1. Again, according to his own axiom, he declares that his love was not ‘in word and with the tongue,' but ‘in deed and in truth:' with special reference, however, to the severe caution which he is about to administer.

And not I only, but also all they that have known the truth: this Christian matron and her children were well known at home and abroad, bearing the same relation in their own spheres as the Gaius of the next Epistle bore in his. It is obvious that knowing the truth is an expression that has two applications here. On the one hand, it defines religion as the experimental knowledge of the revelation brought into the world by Christ, who said ‘I am the Truth:' a definition the force of which was more felt in early times than in later. On the other, it prepared for that distinction between believers in the truth and all false teachers on which the writer purposed to insist.

For the truth's sake which abideth in us and shall be with us for ever. Obviously the common truth is, like regeneration, regarded as the bond of love. But there is an undertone of allusion to the fact that holding fast the truth is the test of religion, and that their common fidelity endeared the faithful to each other. Hence the change to ‘us,' and the quotation of the Lord's words, which applies to the truth what He spoke of the Spirit of truth, ‘He abideth with you and shall be in you:' with the change, however, that here the ‘abiding is ‘in' us, and the ‘being' is ‘with' us. It is like a preliminary triumph, in prospect of the subject that is coming.

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Old Testament